I first noticed it the other day when I was standing in line waiting to have my purchases rung up. The establishment was having a difficulty with their register system, and I asked them what seemed to be the problem.
Turns out the issue they were having was gonna take awhile, so looking at the manager's phone, I blurted out "Look, can I just pay in...") the un-spoken word that I almost said was: HIVE.
That's when I realized a sea-change had occurred in the way I viewed things. I was seeing situations and imagining them being made better with crypto. No longer envisioning the analog world, I was now living on blockchain time.
The Blockchain Is Like Water...
Working as a cashier starting in December was an eye-opener. Having a long line held up by some lady insisting on rooting in her purse for exact change, really made me want this brave new world (no pun intended) to come on and arrive already.
Seeing cards declined and a myriad of other problems crop up that had better solutions available on the blockchain. In my city which is packed with poor people, many un-banked, and with immigrants clawing each others eyes out for the scarce few jobs, woke me up to the realization that something has to change.
One thing that stood out to me was the app call CashApp. Day after day people would come in and put hundreds of dollars on that thing.
When I asked why many of them used it, most told me that they'd had a variety of problems with traditional banks along with those that were here illegally and survived as part of the underground economy.
Working Together
Banks wanted all kinds of ID that they didn't have as part of their KYC, and these people wanted no part of that. I saw that some people had other users who had gone through the verification process (where you have a weekly limit above $250), handle transactions for them, thus keeping them off anybody's radar.
There are other applications where I'm saying to myself: "the blockchain could fix that." Its going to be a long road, but I do believe that day will come.
Leather wallets will be replaced by hardware wallets, and we'll look back fondly to those days before everyone had one. Until then, we'll keep building, and they will come. But for right now, I'll keep living on blockchain time.
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Image Credit: [1] @EverNoticeThat Created using Canva.